Decline In Curling Reflects Ethnic Changes

April 18, 1998|By HOWARD SCHNEIDER The Washington Post

TORONTO — The Royal Canadian Curling Club enjoyed plenty of banner days during its first 100 years. Ontario provincial champs in 1981 and again in 1986. Senior team champs in 1992. Winners of the M.E. Walton Challenge Cup in 1938.

With leagues for kids, seniors and stay-at-home moms, a comfortable lounge and regular ``bonspiel'' tournaments with other curling groups, the club also served as a social center for the downtown neighborhood of Riverdale, a working example of how Canada's loosely constructed culture sustains itself.

These days, however, the members of ``the Royals'' are spending as much time discussing survival and cultural change as talking about when their club might produce its next provincial.

Membership is down roughly 50 percent, a once-bustling trade in after-work curling leagues has all but disappeared, and the club's finances are so tenuous the owners are debating whether to close.

The sport of curling, in which large, smooth rocks are slid shuffleboard-style across a sheet of ice toward a bull's-eye, is as popular as ever in Canada, a de facto national pastime for adults who prefer its beer-and-a-smoke social scene to the aerobic demands of hockey.

Rather, it's a reflection of how Canada's increasingly interracial reality is reshaping the country's major cities. It may have been natural, first for the English and Scots, and later the Latvians and Ukrainians, to embrace a sport that blended sliding across the ice on your knees with lots of time to socialize. It has proved much tougher for the Royals to find an audience among Asian residents who have created one of Toronto's three Chinatowns a few blocks from the Royals' rink.

``We lost our membership. People moved and bought a house in the 'burbs,'' said Bill McAnally, manager of the club, where fluorescent bulbs cast a midday light onto the ice, beige and orange lounge chairs encircle the bar, and trophies adorn the walls.

Curling's following is ``basically . . . the old-style Canadian,'' said Royals president Dave Craddock. Drive through almost any small Canadian town, he said, and ``There's almost always a liquor store, a [Royal Canadian) Legion and a curling club, usually within very close proximity.''

Those towns are almost all white, according to newly released information from a Statistics Canada census that for the first time asked Canadians about their race. With the advent of employment equity laws, multicultural programs and other policies whose monitoring requires race-specific data, Canadian census officials decided they should unambiguously identify what are referred to here as ``visible minorities.''

The data confirmed that Canada's image as an increasingly diverse and multicultural society ends at the boundaries of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, major cities where almost 75 percent of the country's nonwhite population lives. Half of Canada's 10 provinces have minority populations of less then 4 percent, and three of only about 1 percent.

Overall, the portion of Canada's population that is nonwhite is half that of the United States: about 11 percent, or roughly 3.2 million people. About half are Chinese or South Asian; about 570,000 are black.

``The notion of Canada as a tolerant, multiracial, multilingual society is part and parcel of the way we have defined ourselves,'' said Robert Glossop, executive director of programs for the Vanier Institute on the Family. ``However, up until recently, Canada has never been put to the test to really deliver. . . . This diverse cultural complexion is not equally spread across the country.''

That's a fact that the Royals, now in the middle of a city that is almost one-third nonwhite, must cope with if they are to survive, Craddock said. When he joined the club 20 years ago ``there were no Chinese. . . . Now we have a whole Chinatown, and we haven't made inroads.''

Across town, in a cavernous airplane hangar that has been converted into an indoor soccer complex, Francois Glasman is coping with the opposite problem: how to accommodate almost 300 teams of men, women and children from around the world who want to play on the five artificial-turf fields he developed at the old Downsview military base.

More Canadians are registered in soccer leagues now than in hockey leagues, and on any given night you can hear them at Glasman's facility, encouraging each other in Arabic, Spanish and, yes, English. Along with teams from mostly white neighborhoods, the facility is host to one league for Hispanic women and another for players from Central America.

``Way back, Canadians used to call soccer an ethnic game,'' Glasman said. ``No more. . . . This has very much a world soccer flavor. When people are here, they could be in Brazil or Italy or France or England.

``The pot has really melted. The fact that you hear many languages _ that is the fabric of our society.''